Dating Stories: An Interactive Film

This interactive film is a comedic, ‘choose your own adventure’-style narrative directed towards a mature audience. The lead actress in the film, Christine, has two choices from her search on a popular dating app: will she go on a date with Douglas or Jared? Ultimately the participant gets to decide, by using the physical interactive board. Moving the wooden piece from node to node allows the participant to make decisions. Their choices will dictate the story and guide them to one of seven different endings.

Dating Stories is an interactive film where the viewer gets to choose what happens in the narrative. This is a 30-second trailer that demonstrates how the viewer participates in the direction of the story.

For this project we used a combination of p5.js to host the media in the browser and physical computing sensors for the user interaction.

The impact for this project is to allow the observer to take part in the storytelling process by handing over the reins of the direction of the film. I worked as a video editor for many years and I enjoyed having the ability to sculpt a story and wanted to give others the same opportunity.

This is the board that the viewer uses to choose the direction of the film